now, but adds please to take the edge off.
‘I’m trying,’ you say. ‘How’s that?’
‘We’ll send you up for X-rays,’ she replies and walks away.
You feel a lurch in the pit of your stomach.
The curtains slide shut and an efficient voice announces that she’s Shirley, your nurse, here to clean you up and she’s sorry but she’s going to have to cut those clothes off you, she’s afraid. You remember that you’re still in your jogging gear—dark blue T-shirt and shorts—and are only now aware they are wet with sweat and probably blood.
Underwear.
You realise she’s going to cut off your underwear and think,
(a) I’m wearing the black cotton shorts, a little worn but not too bad, and
(b) I don’t want Shirley inspecting my cock.
As if she can mind-read, Shirley places a towel over you and reaches under, cutting down your left side from hip to thigh, then your right. A gentle tug and the whole kit comes away like a disposable diaper and you’re so relieved to have held on to this shred of dignity that you don’t even notice how she removes your T-shirt.
Your arms keep slipping off the bed as she bathes you and she comments how these silly hospital trolleys are too small for a big man like you. There’s something about the way she says ‘big man’ that tells you she finds you attractive and a number of thoughts form and synthesise into something like this: That’s not very appropriate but it’s good if she wants to have sex with you because she’ll make sure you’re alive aren’t we absurd everything comes down to sex in the end even when we’re dying does she have a nice body you’re pathetic what about Wendy who knew it was possible to feel this much pain surely childbirth couldn’t be this bad? Only in your head, the thoughts don’t happen one after the other like they do on paper, they all happen at once; it’s like simultaneously watching five different movies but being able to understand everything.
Shirley leans over to shine a light in your eye, providing a brief opportunity to examine her with your remaining, undilated, pupil. She’s small-breasted with sad eyes and big teeth. And for some reason you form the opinion that she’s a single mother of two high-schoolers which means that you could go back to her place without being disturbed until three o’clock at least.
Frank the Helper arrives to take you up to X-rays. He’s hyper-friendly like he knows you’re dying and he’s trying to fill your last moments with warmth and bonhomie. He rattles and prattles all the way to the lift which whines in a high-pitched, almost human, voice until you arrive with a clunk. Frank pushes you through transparent plastic swing doors and he’s so damn jaunty you’d swear he was rolling you into a bar for a beer. His big head bobs and jerks and guffaws and suddenly he’s gone.
You are abandoned in a tiny cubicle near the swing doors. Except for the cosmic hum of the universe, there is no sign of anything anywhere.
You are floating in a pool of pain.
Your heart beats in your head.
Where’s Wendy? Why didn’t she insist on staying with you? You are going to die alone because she’s too polite.
You drift.
You are the drifting.
A huge pale green machine points its blunt nose at you. It hums and tuts and grunts and then nothing. You lie alone until Frank reappears and trundles you back into the lift, through the maze of corridors and out into a different room.
A fresh-faced young woman in a nurse’s uniform says, ‘Would you like to sit up?’
Without waiting for an answer, she winds the bed up and you can see a nurses’ station and other beds and a teenage girl with a drip in her arm sitting cross-legged on a bed, poised over a bucket.
Wendy’s compact figure walks towards you. Your mate Dazza once described her (a little too lasciviously for your liking) as ‘a tidy ship’. Her symmetrical face is rescued from generic prettiness by the startling blue of her eyes and an overly full lower lip that curves to reveal a crooked bottom tooth when she smiles, which she does now. It’s one of those appealing faces that people think they know. Quite often she is accosted by beaming strangers who have mistaken her for a long-lost friend or relative. At the last minute, of course, they realise their error and babble an embarrassed explanation. Wendy, being Wendy, always defuses the situation with her gracious good humour.
Your wife reaches the bed and takes your hand. She looks like she’s been through an ordeal but there’s a lightness about her that makes you feel enormously relieved.
Enormously relieved. Like a million fucking bucks actually.
The Indian doctor calls you miracle man and tells you there are no broken bones; you’ve fractured some teeth and they have to assess the extent of any internal bleeding blah blah blah and you’re looking at Wendy knowing you’re going to live and you’re going to walk and you’re floating on happiness and you start to vomit but nothing comes up.
The dry retching is probably caused by nausea which is probably caused by the pain, your Indian goddess declares in an I-told-you-so tone. Her pager beeps her off to more urgent matters and she orders the fresh-faced nurse to give you some painkillers and a shot of Somethingerol.
You’re a big baby when it comes to needles so you feel quite relieved there’s already a shunt in your arm. Wendy takes your hand as Fresh Face inserts a needle into the shunt with crisp, slightly theatrical efficiency. She smiles at you but she doesn’t see you; she sees the Patient. You realise you’re performing in a pageant, the star of which is the Fresh Faced Nurse. You’re a bit player, written in to demonstrate what a wonderful carer she is.
You avert your eyes from the needle and notice your left thigh is huge, swollen to twice its normal size.
‘It’s a haematoma,’ explains Fresh Face like she invented the word. ‘Your thigh muscle is filling with blood.’
You feel woozy.
‘There,’ she says, as an iciness crawls up the veins in your arm, ‘All better!’
But it’s not all better at all, at all.
Beads of cold sweat form on your forehead and your mouth dries up. You ask Wendy to get the children; you want to see them. Wendy protests. She doesn’t want to frighten them.
Declan is seventeen and in his final year at Mount Karver. He is not a steady student but thanks to his mother’s vigilance and his own gift for charming everyone he meets, he’s almost over the finish line. Rosie is living in fourteen-year-old hell, teetering on the edge of an eating disorder and permanently plugged into the vicious lyrics of dead rappers. She hates her parents, school and life, in that order.
You know Wendy is in shock and you know her first instinct is to protect the children but you want to shout, ‘For fuck’s sake! I just want to see my fucking children before I die!’ But you don’t need to say anything because Wendy knows what you are thinking and takes out her snazzy red phone.
‘You can’t use that in here!’ announces Fresh Face like Wendy’s trying to detonate a bomb.
Wendy
